


Amnesia

by JacarandaBanyan



Series: Stony Bingo fills [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Amnesia, And Steve being sneaky, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Fluff, Head Injury, M/M, STONY Bingo 2018, Steve being dumb, Stony Bingo, The Serum is the gift that keeps on giving, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, bingo prompt, blink and you miss it angst, dunce cap, prompt, very mild angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 22:41:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14757665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Steve fakes amnesia so Tony will explain email to him again.





	Amnesia

**Author's Note:**

> Bingo prompt: Amnesia
> 
> Thank you to @FestiveFerret and @maevee for betaing this on short notice!

The last thing Steve remembered before waking up in a SHIELD hospital was a building falling on him. He’d been chasing down a grad student turned mad scientist while Tony and Thor held off the highly destructive spider-robots said grad student had released in central Queens. The Spider-child may have been there too - he remembered Tony yelling, "No Peter, it’s under control, there are plenty of spiders here already, no need to add you to the mix," into the comms, and heaven knows that kid never listened. Then all of a sudden one of the spider-robots had collided with the building, and the roof started raining down.

He groaned, sat up, and took stock of his injuries. His head felt a bit heavier than normal, but that was probably the special drugs they had to use to anesthetize him. Nothing else hurt, so either the Serum or SHIELD medical must have taken care of it while he was out. 

He settled back into bed and waited for a nurse to show up and tell him he could leave. He was never on bed rest long, and by this point they all knew how quickly he bounced back from even severe injuries. While he waited, he made a list in his head of everything he’d have to do once he got discharged. He needed to fill out a mission report for SHIELD, check and see if he was needed for some sort of press conference, check up on the rest of his teammates and find out who’d been injured and what equipment needed fixing or replacing, email Tony a list of things that needed fixing or replacing - right.

Email.

Steve supposed he should have gotten the hang of email by now, but for some reason he was still having difficulty with it. At first he’d gone and asked questions, even though it made him feel silly, but it wasn’t long before he’d gotten real tired of the "I’m totally blindsided by the fact that this really confusing thing would be confusing to you" face. How should he know that gmail was email? They were clearly different sorts of mail, they had different letters in front!

His thoughts were interrupted by a worried-looking SHIELD nurse wearing the sort of deliberately reassuring face that immediately made him suspicious. She held a clipboard close to her scrubs so he couldn’t see what was written on it.

“Hello, Captain Rogers. My name is Kathy, and I work with this hospital’s trauma doctors. Do you know how you got here?”

“The last thing I remember is my head hurting an awful lot, ma’am.”

Why would someone from trauma be here for him? Surely she was needed elsewhere, with people who didn’t have the Serum. There had just been an attack on Queens, surely there were victims there that could use a doctor who specialized in trauma. 

Oh well. He’d breeze through this check-in as quickly as possible, and then he’d go try and figure out what a pdf was and how he could email one. Or was it how he could gmail one? If gmail was email, which word was he supposed to use? Coulson and Hill said "email," but that didn’t necessarily mean that was the right way to say it. He was pretty sure someone had forbidden any SHIELD agents he came in contact with from using any modern slang where he could hear it and get confused.

She checked something off on her clipboard. “Now, how many fingers am I holding up?”

She held up two fingers in what Steve had learned was called a peace sign. She couldn’t quite bend her middle and fourth fingers completely away from each other, so her thumb was pushing down on her fourth finger to keep it flush against her palm, and her middle finger leaned forward a bit, making the sign a little lopsided. 

“Two, ma’am.”

“Good, good. Okay, can you tell me who the president is?”

_ Oh. _

The building had collapsed  _ on his head _ . SHIELD was worried about his brain. He was pretty sure the Serum applied to his brain too, but he hadn’t exactly tested it out. Her clipboard must be full of memory questions. They’d probably run a few scans afterwards to look for any obvious damage, then set him loose. He should just quickly answer her questions, get whatever scans they wanted, and get to work with his post-battle checklist. 

_ Or, _ a sly voice in the back of his head said,  _ you could get Tony to explain email to you again _ . It sounded remarkably like the one that had convinced him each time he’d tried to lie his way into the military back in the forties that  _ this _ time would be different. 

No, he couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Lying was wrong. And SHIELD would catch him in the lie anyway once they scanned him and everything came back just fine.

_ But you could blame that on the Serum, _ the sly voice weedled.  _ And you would get to see Tony talking about tech again. His smile is so cute when he gets caught up on some tangent. It’s so different from how he smiles on TV. Besides, if you have him come here and explain it to you again, he’ll have to come to the hospital, and you know he’s been going back to the Tower to hide his wounds. If he comes here, one of the nurses is bound to catch him and give him a check up. Do it for your boyfriend, Steve. _

“Roosevelt?” he asked, like he didn’t know the right answer but knew a wrong one, and was hoping she could help him out. He’d been getting better at playing innocent since realizing that no one at SHIELD ever suspected him of telling anything less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

The woman paused, then made another mark on her clipboard. 

“Can you tell me what today's date is?”

“Ummmm…”

He tried to think fast. What was a good date? Something close to coming out of the ice, but not the exact day. Or maybe that was a good day to pick? Plenty of personal and psychological significance, he could probably sucker the doctors into believing it. No, wait, he had to know what SHIELD was, otherwise he wouldn’t have woken up and waited patiently in the hospital like this, so it had to be a bit later.

After waiting a few heartbeats, she made another mark on her clipboard. “Not sure, huh? Okay, how about you just tell me some of the most recent things you remember.” Worry colored her tone, though she tried to mask it with calm, optimistic phrasing. 

His heart twinged in his chest. He shouldn’t let her worry when there was nothing to worry about. 

“Well, I remember waking up in a SHIELD hospital, and Fury explaining that SHIELD found me in the arctic and that it had been seventy years since the war. And then Coulson showed me my room at SHIELD headquarters. And then he introduced me to a couple of other people.” Wait, he hadn’t met Tony until after SHIELD had given him his first computer talk. He couldn’t ask Tony to explain things to him again if he wasn’t supposed to know who Tony was!

“I can’t quite recall what we talked about, but I think SHIELD might have given me a couple of presentations? I can’t really remember what they were about. And then I met Tony Stark when he came over to antagonize Fury! He was real friendly about explaining things I didn’t understand.”

Maybe that was laying it on a bit thick? Was he making his play obvious by referring to Tony by name? No, the nurse seemed to buy it.

“Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news Captain, but you sustained a serious head injury in the field earlier today, and it seems to be causing you some memory issues. Hopefully, you’ll recover and your memories will return, but for now, we’ll try and scrounge up a familiar face to keep you company.”

…

Tony rushed into the room twenty minutes later, which Steve happened to know was exactly how long it took to fly from Stark Tower to SHIELD’s medical facility outside the city. A warm feeling bloomed in his chest like a bright, summer flower. Tony collapsed dramatically onto the hospital bed. He was panting too hard to speak clearly, but he tried anyway.

“Heard” -  _ gasp - _ “your head” -  _ cough _ \- “took one for the team” -  _ rasp. _ “Don’t remember” -  _ wheeze _ \- “the wonders of the twenty-first century.” 

“Slow down, Tony. Catch your breath.”

“But  _ Steve _ ” -  _ gasp - _ “you’re a technological illiterate again!”  _ Cough. _ “I can’t be friends with a technological illiterate, so I’ve got to get you back up to speed!”

Steve smiled and rubbed Tony’s back.

“You can take thirty seconds to stop choking on air. Besides, my memories will probably come back in a while, I just need you to explain a few things for me.”

“Anything. Shoot. You ask, I’ll demonstrate.”

“First, snuggles.”

One of Steve’s favorite things about his relatively new relationship with Tony was the snuggles, and he asked for them every opportunity he could get. He locked his arms around Tony’s heaving chest and laid back on the bed, pulling Tony with him. Tony squawked in indignation but shifted into a more comfortable position and cuddled into the crook of Steve’s neck.

“You’re sure you’re okay? Brain damage is serious. Wouldn’t want you turning into a braindead zombie in two weeks or something because Mr. Self-Sacrificing didn’t tell anyone he had a headache and ‘thought it was nothing.’”

Steve laughed quiet and low in his chest so Tony could feel it better than he could hear it.

“I promise not to turn into a zombie.”

Tony elbowed him.

“Don’t make my fears sound irrational, that would be just your luck.”

Steve tightened his arms around him and repositioned Tony’s legs so that they weren’t hanging off the side of the bed.

“Relax, I’ll be fine. Here, you came here to explain tech to me again, right? My post-mission checklist says I have to email something, so how about you explain email to me.”

Tony wiggled upright and looked at him like a dog at someone who was holding a treat.

“What about it? How it works? History of it? Different providers?”

“Anything.”

Steve settled a little further into his pillows and smiled as Tony started talking a mile a minute with an unselfconscious smile. He chattered about everything there was to know about email. Steve fought to pay attention to his words instead of how adorable his enthusiasm was, but once he started talking about changes to gmail’s code since it was first introduced, he gave up and stared unabashedly at his boyfriend. 

Eventually Coulson came in to shoo Tony out so Steve could get his head scanned. Tony hugged him one last time before he went. Steve saw a nurse lurking just outside Tony’s field of vision, clearly waiting for the opportunity to ambush him. Good; if Tony was hiding any injuries himself, the nurse would probably catch them. 

Before they parted, Tony leaned forward and whispered into Steve’s ear.

“I was so scared you’d forgotten me. I’ll explain whatever you want, whenever you want. I’m always here.” His voice was tight, without any trace of his usual jocund overtones. 

Steve suddenly wanted to be sick to his stomach. Lying to the SHIELD nurse was one thing, scaring Tony was another.  _ God, _ he was an idiot.

It wasn’t until the door closed on Tony’s retreating back that he realized he’d been so enamored with Tony’s enthusiasm that he hadn’t retained a word of what he’d said.

…

Of course, Steve’s brain scans came back perfectly clean. Over the course of the next day and a half, he pretended to remember things, and SHIELD medical quickly granted him a clean bill of health. 

The first thing he did was head over to the Tower and go down to the lab to see Tony. 

The lab was chaotic as always. One of the bots was chasing another one with a fire extinguisher, papers and tools were strewn across a desk, a workbench, and the surrounding floor, and loud, pulsing music drowned out anything else. Tony sat in the middle of it like the conductor of a particularly large orchestra, waving holo screens around and typing on virtual keyboards.

As soon as he noticed he had a visitor, he shut off the music and danced past the bots to where Steve was waiting for him.

“Hello, handsome. To what do I owe to the pleasure? Are you here to force-feed me? Drag me to the gym to show off the benefits of super science? Are you finally going to let me hook you up to some of my machines and have a little fun?”

His smile stayed stubbornly on his face, but the initial cheer in his eyes flattened a bit when he noticed Steve’s expression. 

“Is everything okay?”

“I made a mistake, and I need to apologize for it.” He took a deep breath and soldiered on. “I lied when I told that SHIELD nurse I was having memory troubles. I was perfectly fine. The Serum healed everything before I even woke up. I just panicked when I saw that I had to email someone, because I couldn’t remember what a pdf was or how to email it. So, I faked a more serious head injury than I actually had so someone would explain it to me again.”

Dear Lord, that sounded so much stupider when he said it out loud.

Tony turned around and hollered for his robot.

“Hey Dum-E, stop chasing Butterfingers and pay attention! Go get your dunce cap and bring it here. No, it’s not for you, though you are a dunce, I don’t know why I don’t reprogram you, it’s for my dumbass boyfriend who thought he needed to pretend he had amnesia so he could convince me to explain something to him again.”

The robot carefully set the fire extinguisher down near the workbench, then wheeled away to the corner to pick up a big white dunce cap, obviously fitted to the uppermost joint on the robot’s arm. It rolled up to Tony and carefully handed him the cap. Tony took it and patted the second-lowest joint on it’s arm.

Steve stood obediently still as Tony put the dunce cap on his head and tied the little strings under his chin to fasten it there. 

Tony stood up on his toes to kiss Steve’s nose. 

“There. Now everyone can see what a dummy you are. You can’t tell, but all of my bots are laughing at you right now. You’ve made yourself into a laughing stock, Steve.”

“I think I can live with that.”

He leaned down to kiss Tony again. “I promise not to scare you like that again. If I tell a doctor I’m injured, I’ll actually be injured next time.”


End file.
